Sarah McCoubrey's 2005 painting, Onondaga Nation is on display in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts exhibition Art For Society's Sake: The WPA and Its Legacy. The exhibition presents works by artists who participated in the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). These New Deal initiatives helped spearhead public art initiatives in the United States and documented the social realities of an American generation through a diverse group of artistic voices.
Contemporary artists like McCoubrey build off of this legacy, embedding social and environmental concerns within her work. Through both visual art and the collection of oral histories, the Works Progress Administration marked a major shift in the exposure Native Americans received within public history. Living and working in Fayetteville, New York in Onondaga County, the contemporary realities of the Onondaga people (one of the nations that constituted the Iroquois Confederacy) have been the occasional social subject of McCoubrey's landscape paintings.
Art For Society's Sake: The WPA and Its Legacy is on view through April 6, 2014 at PAFA.